The end is nigh

How did the triumphant winner of the 1992 election become the disregarded underdog of 1997?

WHICH is the real John Major? Is he the John Major whom much of the public thinks it knows: boring, panicky and weak? Or is he the John Major whom his few but staunch fans discern: not so nice but cleverer, braver and more resilient than his public image, his chief problem that he leads a party which has taken leave of its senses? In short, is Mr Major's plight his own fault?

Few recent prime ministers have taken the battering that Mr Major has these past few years--or been viewed with such condescension, even contempt. Harold Wilson in 1967-70 was loathed by half his cabinet and most commentators, but he remained surprisingly popular with the public. Margaret Thatcher, by contrast, was (usually) loathed by the public but admired by many commentators and fawned over by her party. Mr Major's difficulty is that no one seems to be impressed by him: not the left of his party (who think he is weak on Europe) nor its right (who also think so, for opposite reasons); not pundits, even in most of the Tory press; and not voters, who are dissatisfied with the way he is doing his job by nearly two-to-one, according to the latest MORI poll.

In his stubborn way, Mr Major has not yet given up on the election, though he knows that the odds against him are formidable. Now the campaign is under way, he seems liberated from his cares. That may not last but the case for Mr Major needs to be put nevertheless. Suppose he kicked off his shoes, poured himself a large one and talked, fluently and in plain language--rather than with the usual woodenness of his public utterances--about his achievements. What might he say in his own defence?

First, he would fairly point to the difficulties of his inheritance. When he succeeded Mrs Thatcher on November 28th 1990, both the Tory party and the government were in deep trouble. The Lawson boom had come to an end. The credit boom was followed by credit bust; house prices were plunging and the dread words “negative equity” haunted many middle-income families. Moreover, Mr Major also inherited the poll tax, the product of his predecessor's attempt to reform local-government finance, which had young rebels on the streets and old rebels deserting the Conservatives in droves.

The party itself was seriously divided, Mr Major would stress. It brought itself (just) to ditch Mrs Thatcher as leader. And yet large numbers of MPs and many Conservatives in the country had not ditched her as their spiritual leader. Indeed, in some ways she was more dominant in myth than she had been in real life. She remained the rallying point for the Eurosceptics in the party, who conveniently forgot that it was their heroine who had signed the Single European Act, introducing majority voting and conceding new powers for the European Court of Justice. Mr Major had been her candidate for leader; but the task of becoming his own man without alienating her and her supporters was never going to be easy.

The final difficulty of his inheritance, Mr Major might point out, was that he had to create his own agenda. The first work of a Tory government had been easy to communicate if not to carry out: crush the unions, tame inflation, privatise nationalised monopolies, balance the budget. Moreover, there was no question in the early 1980s that Labour was against these things, which made them easier to dramatise.

As that first agenda was fulfilled, Mr Major had to develop a new one, based on the health and education reforms on which Mrs Thatcher had only started and which are summed up in the new Tory slogan “opportunity for all”. He had to push these through against internal opposition, and to gain some credit with voters for them even when the Labour Party, far from opposing them, increasingly tried to steal his best tunes.

His party wanted him to be a radical, but Thatcherite radicalism went beyond what his more conservative disposition--and voters--would stomach. Still, there has always been enough of a Tory radical about Mr Major to prevent his administration becoming a no-change government, a trait illustrated by its breathtaking decision this month to propose the privatisation of the basic state pension.

If Mr Major's inheritance was difficult, how much more so were his problems in his six years in Number 10, and especially after he won the 1992 election. Tory Euroscepticism grew more virulent, as latterly did the determination of the remaining Tory Europhiles not to surrender to it. Taxes had to rise, starting with VAT on fuel in the 1993 budget, and as they went up Tory public-opinion ratings went down. The ratings themselves niggled away at morale in his party, making it harder for him to manage it.

He was dogged through his second term by the small size of his parliamentary majority. In the 1992 general election, the Tories' share of the vote was only 1.6 percentage points lower than in their first victory in 1979, almost as big as in 1983 and 1987 and a full eight percentage points ahead of Labour. At previous elections that would have been enough for a House of Commons majority of perhaps 70 seats.

However, by 1992, Britain's anti-Tory voters had embraced strategic voting with a vengeance, with Liberal Democrat and Labour supporters each opting for the party best placed to dislodge the Tories in marginal seats. Mr Major's electoral triumph won him an overall parliamentary majority of only 21 seats. This rendered him increasingly vulnerable to small but determined groups of rebels on his own backbenches. “If he had had a majority of 70, the whole history of the last five years would have been different,” says David Willetts, an MP who chairs the Tory research department.

Excuses, excuses. But Mr Major's fans think he needs no excuses. They expect history to treat him well, not because of his excuses but because of his achievements.

Obviously, a relaxed Mr Major would boast, as he constantly does in public, of his economic successes. Britain, he would point out, has the fastest-growing economy among the big European countries. Unemployment has fallen from a peak under his government of 3m in 1992 to 1 3/4m now. Not only is underlying inflation at 2.9% historically low, but the government has gradually changed Britain's inflationary psychology. Boom-bust, Mr Major hopes, is a thing of the past. In another term, he could concentrate on his social agenda: education, health, pensions, the Citizen's Charter and opportunities for those at the bottom of the ladder.

His own list of achievements does not end there. The IRA ceasefire may have collapsed, but Mr Major still considers his policy on Northern Ireland a success. He has weaned America from its instinctive support for the IRA, forged good links with Dublin and begun to erode the community support on which the terrorists rely. This he ascribes to his willingness to take risks with the unionists in his own party by entering into an open-ended peace process.

On Europe, he is where he wants to be. Britain is still in there, arguing. Mr Major does not consider withdrawal from the European Union an option. But he has resisted thoughtless EU integration, held at bay the social chapter, and kept open Britain's options over the single currency, while increasingly indicating his personal scepticism about the project.

Sleaze among his MPs had barely rubbed off on the prime minister--at least until he was accused as the election campaign opened of bringing forward the prorogation of Parliament to suppress a Commons report on allegations of financial impropriety by Tory MPs. Mr Major thinks he forestalled criticism by setting up the Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life in October 1994.

In education, Mr Major introduced nursery vouchers, despite the resistance of Gillian Shephard, his own education minister. In health, he has pushed through the internal-market reforms within the National Health Service, increasing the efficiency of services. He forced through railway privatisation, even as wetter Tories were describing it as a “poll tax on wheels”. He has even stuck with the Citizen's Charter for public services--a policy at which commentators like to sneer but which has done more to improve services than is ever reported in the national media.

None of this is dazzling. But it is evidence, say his friends, of determined persistence. He has dodged obstacles, braved the flak, and kept his eye on his goals. Mr Major, who possesses a formidable if fragile ego, sees no need to apologise.

The unanswered questions

Why, to most people, does it appear otherwise? Why is the common perception of his government that it is drifting and purposeless? Why do so many view Mr Major as weak, addicted to expediency and prone to lurch ahead with half-baked ideas? To begin to answer these questions, it is necessary to take a short diversion into the nature of modern British political leadership.

In Britain, as in most democracies, there is now less faith in the beneficence of government. It is not enough for a government to be doing more or less the right things. It also needs to locate what it is doing in the common experience of the people over whom it rules; at the least to win their acquiescence and at best to enlist their support. Communication is not a second-order task. Today it is essential to reach any important objective.

Outside election campaigns, Mr Major is a poor communicator. His syntax slides up and down get-out clauses and convenient evasions. When he deploys a soundbite, it invariably comes over as shrill. When he wants to sound firm he sounds stubborn. He can be funny in private, but rarely in public. He usually appears grey and cautious. He seems lacking in confidence, and sometimes to have a chip on his shoulder.

These character problems underlie some of the failures that have hurt his government. Mr Major's allies claim that in 1992 he knew an abrupt announcement that the government was closing most of the country's coal mines would be a political disaster. But then why did he fail to stop Michael Heseltine, then president of the Board of Trade, from charging ahead? Mr Major's allies claim that his “back to basics” campaign of 1993 was planned as a slogan to cover the government's policies on education and the family, nothing more. But when “back to basics” got translated into a moral crusade by over-enthusiastic Tory briefers, Mr Major did nothing to regain control. The campaign blew apart when too many Tory MPs were found in beds outside the marital home.

Even Mr Major now admits that Britain's entry to the European Union's exchange-rate mechanism, and its humiliating ejection from it in 1992, was a “political mistake”. The memory of the government suddenly jacking up interest rates by five percentage points on a “Black Wednesday” in September in a panicky effort to stay in the ERM, after having refused throughout the summer to raise them at all to protect sterling, has been burned into the public consciousness. These episodes suggest a lack of grip at the top.

Condemning Mr Major for the convoluted twists of his European policy is more difficult given his party's divides. An anti-European mood spread through the country in the mid-1990s, reflected in opinion polls and fanned by newspapers from the Daily Telegraph to the Sun. Mr Major himself has become less pro-European as a result of his experiences with it: the summits full of posturing, the endless negotiations, the unwillingness of his continental counterparts to match his mastery of detail.

Moreover, the prime minister was right to resist some Brussels designs: for adding to labour costs through the social chapter, for watering down the national veto over some EU policies, for a premature move to monetary union. But he failed to communicate the other half of the picture: that Britain should be (in his original phrase) “at the heart of Europe”, and that it also derives benefits from EU membership, especially from the single market. His whips erred in counselling Mr Major that anti-Europeanism would blow over in the party, so long as the “pros” did not provoke it. But a more far-sighted premier would have realised that, attractive though short-run trimming to the Eurosceptics was, in the long term it would only encourage them to demand ever more and to push his government to the edge.

This failure of communication and strategy has been compounded by what history may decide was the prime minister's fatal flaw--his inability to make a decision and then stick to it. Mr Major was once a whip himself, which seems to have made him prone to the whip's mentality: survive today, whatever the costs for tomorrow.

The most famous example, which nearly lost him his job, came in 1994 over the issue of majority voting in Europe. During negotiations, Mr Major promised in the Commons that Britain would “fight its corner hard”. Labour, he said, would fold and its then leader, John Smith, was “Monsieur Oui, the poodle of Brussels”. But barely had his troops been led cheering to the top of the hill, than Mr Major was leading them back down again, announcing a compromise. “You have no authority, credibility or identifiable policy in this vital area,” said Tony Marlow, a Tory backbencher. “Why don't you stand aside and make way for someone else?”

This is just one example among many. Mr Major resisted promising a referendum on a single currency, then did. He first insisted that the IRA had to decommission some weapons before being allowed into political talks, and then said they could join before they did. He declared a “beef war” with the EU over its handling of the BSE issue, then called the war off a month later with little gained. In all these cases, a defence of sorts can be constructed for Mr Major: he was trying to set out a tough negotiating position before compromising. But even if that were true, it made him look like a wimp.

His vacillations compounded his party-management problems. The trouble was that no one in his party was ever sure whether a “no” from Mr Major was actually a “maybe, later”. Thus the Europhobes went on pressing for a firm commitment against a single currency in the next Parliament through this winter long after Mr Major had said that he would not give way. Mr Major was probably telling the truth, if only because a pledge would have meant the loss of Kenneth Clarke, the chancellor, and the collapse of his government. But they did not believe him.

Mr Major, moreover, has not been skilful at getting rid of people. In 1992, Norman Lamont, his then chancellor, should have been sacrificed as soon as Britain was forced out of the ERM. Mr Major weakly let him linger for eight more months before dispatching him--earning, in the process, Mr Lamont's life-long enmity.

In September 1992, David Mellor was allowed to remain as heritage secretary for too long with Mr Major's support before scandal forced him to quit. In 1995, many Tory MPs believe that Mr Major threw away the effects of his successful recontesting of the party leadership by promoting Michael Portillo, who nearly stood against him, from employment to defence, while (typically) pretending that it was not a promotion at all. That was his second great chance to reconstruct his cabinet more in his image--his first was after his 1992 election victory--and he did not seize it.

Human weakness

Put all this down to Mr Major's humanity if you will. But Mrs Thatcher, who also claimed to hate sacking people, had no such compunction. One by one the wets were purged. Mr Major seems to construct his cabinets with balance in mind. Unfortunately in a divided party, a balanced cabinet cannot be a harmonious cabinet.

Nothing highlights Mr Major's real problems more than comparisons with both his predecessor and his likely successor. Mrs Thatcher, love her or loathe her, was a leader. She made her share of tactical retreats, but her strength was such that they were perceived as tactical even at the time. When she failed, she paused and then advanced again. She saw party divides as a challenge to be overcome, not a fact of life to be worked round. She purged her political opponents whenever she was strong enough to do so. She cultivated Tory allies, alternating charm and steel. She knew where she was going and where she wanted her country to go.

Tony Blair has not, of course, faced the test of office. But in opposition his toughness has been undeniable. He forced the change in Labour's nationalise-everything Clause Four through his party, when weaker souls counselled caution.

He invented “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, overriding party liberals. He has insisted on restraint on public spending, against his party's instincts; and forced Gordon Brown, the shadow chancellor, to rule out a higher rate of income tax for the rich. He refused to ditch Harriet Harman, a member of his shadow cabinet, when she annoyed Labour MPs by sending her son to a grammar school, but demoted Clare Short, another shadow-cabinet member, when she made clear her dissent from some of his objectives.

Unlike Mr Major, but like Mrs Thatcher, Mr Blair commands the House of Commons. The public have not decided if they like Mr Blair, but they respect him, as they did Mrs Thatcher. The same cannot be said of Mr Major.

There are alibis to be advanced on Mr Major's behalf. His hand, so strong after his 1992 election victory, was rapidly weakened by events beyond his control as well as by blunders for which he must take responsibility. But his predicament today results from his essential character weakness that renders him, ultimately, not truly a leader. This is why he now faces an uphill struggle, of Sisyphean proportions, to convince Britain's voters to entrust him with five more years leading his country.